West Papuans between Transnationalism and Internationalism

Abstract This article argues that West Papuan independence activists reveal the limits of decolonisation as a universal project of self‑determination. It shows how sub‑state actors were squeezed between transnational anticolonial solidarities and an international order increasingly structured around nation‑states. Focusing on the 1960s, it traces how West Papuan leaders sought to turn a territorial dispute into a people‑centred claim to self‑determination by mobilising race‑based transnational networks that linked Melanesia to a wider Black International. Drawing on the personal papers of Nicholas Jouwe and West Papuan petitions to the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity, the article reconstructs efforts to enlist African and Caribbean diplomats as advocates in debates over the New York Agreement and the 1969 Act of Free Choice. It shows that, while Papuan activists strategically racialised themselves as Black and Melanesian to articulate decolonisation’s unfinished business, Indonesian diplomats and many postcolonial states activated civilisational hierarchies and the discourse of development to deny their claims and close off alternative futures. By following Papuan actors across local, regional, and global arenas after formal empire, the article demonstrates how decolonisation’s discontents arose not only within new nation‑states but also from the international norms that purported to universalise self‑determination.